Plainfield neighbors relieved as child pornographer sentenced

Kelly Rohlfing's daughter didn't ride her bike or strap on roller blades last summer. When winter came, she didn't build a snowman in the front yard.

The young girl lived in fear of Mario Meschino, the neighbor up the street who had secretly been taking pictures of her and her friends, Rohlfing said.

"My daughter never opened her bedroom blinds (after that) in fear he might see inside," Rohlfing said as her voice cracked during a federal court sentencing hearing Thursday that resulted in Meschino getting a prison sentence of 30 years for possession and distribution of child pornography.

In a case that drove neighbors of the quiet Plainfield neighborhood to sit in angry vigil through months of court dates and that had the defendant's mother covering her ears in disbelief Thursday as prosecutors detailed a string of dark allegations, U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras handed down the maximum sentence available for the child pornography charges.

"Quite frankly, I find Mr. Meschino to be a danger to the community," Kocoras said about the former school bus driver.

The FBI said they recovered more than a thousand images and videos of child pornography on Meschino's bedroom computer, which Kocoras called "disturbing to the eye and terrifying to the human spirit."

There were also hundreds of photos of clothed children, many of them smiling and posing, on Meschino's school bus, as well as photos of neighborhood children, jumping on a trampoline and swimming in a backyard pool, Assistant U.S. Attorney Angel Krull said.

A central feature in the sentencing hearing Thursday was testimony by a relative of Meschino who said she was sexually abused by Meschino for 10 years, beginning when she was about 4 or 5. Meschino was not charged in relation to those allegations, and his attorney, J. Clifford Greene, questioned the relative's credibility and argued there was no truth to the claims.

Kocoras, however, believed her, and said the testimony colored the sentencing.

As the relative, now an adult, sat on the witness stand and described in detail the acts she said Meschino forced her to commit, Meschino's mother, Loretta Meschino, covered her ears with her hands.

Loretta Meschino sat directly behind her son in the first row of the court's wooden benches. Her entire body shook when she told the judge that the charges do not describe the boy she raised.

Meschino's father, Robert Meschino Sr., read from his statement scrawled on notebook paper that "Mario is not a monster."